Westeros

The very popular SF/F web video series, Sword and Laser, will have a kind of “A Song of Ice and Fire” double-header this Friday. They’ll be talking to Professor Henry O. Jacoby, editor of Game of Thrones and Philosophy (Order:  US Paperback, US Kindle, UK) . And then, of course, they’ll also be speaking with George R.R. Martin about the Game of Thrones, “A Song of Ice and Fire”, and more.

You can find the episode some time this Friday, posted at the official Sword and Laser site, as well as Sword and Laser‘s page at Geek and Sundry or the Sword and Laser Youtube Channel. Note that presently they feature an interview and extended interview with James S.A. Corey—aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (who may be better known to fans as George R.R. Martin’s assistant)—regarding his/their book, Leviathan Wakes.

Although the number of “A Song of Ice and Fire” and Game of Thrones-related songs and videos have increased ten fold over the last year, we haven’t had too much time to share any of them… but this one, sent our way by Adam Whitehead, caught our attention. Based on Wiz Khalifa’s hit “Black and Yellow”, this one rather amusingly spins it as a song about the Baratheon brothers. It’s charming and, hey, lots of references to details in the books (“Lightbringer!” “Rainbow Guard!):

Good fun!

We’ve just learned that A Dance with Dragons—the fifth novel in the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series—has been announced as the winner of the 2012 Locus Award for Best Novel. Presented each year, the Locus Awards are administered by Locus Magazine, the foremost SF/F publishing trade magazine. The yearly Locus Poll—open to everyone, although submissions by current subscribers are weighted—has been very kind to the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, with every novel taking first place with the exception of A Feast for Crows (which was #2 in the poll, just behind that year’s winner, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys).

Congratulations to GRRM and, indeed, all the winners of this year’s Locus Awards! For those who are curious, China Mieville’s Embassytown took Best SF Novel, while Catherine Valente scored wins in three separate categories (YA, novelette, and novella). The full list of finalists can be found at here, while we’ll update when the official and complete results are available online.

UPDATE: The full list of winners and finalists can be found here.

... sort of.

Following up the late evening mea culpa over a shockingly controversial non-story that took the entirety of three months to crack wide open (it’s hard being a journalist, you know, when you’ve got to make the stories yourself), HBO seems to have decided to go even further: according to the AV Club, HBO is apparently having the head removed or replaced on the DVD and Bluray ... but they’re also pulling the episode from HBO On Demand, HBO Go, and even iTunes. So, yeah, it’s going to be really hard to find it soon enough.

But, you know? That also means that the unadulterated, as-meant-to-be-aired final episode will never be seen again on HBO. That includes future Blurays and DVDs…. but there’s still the current run available at fine retailers the world over. Best get these before they go the way of the original Star Wars trilogy. You can order them at Amazon.com while supplies last: US DVD, US Bluray, UK DVD, and UK Bluray.

We’ve now posted our even-longer second half of our overview of Game of Thrones, sharing our views on what we liked, what we disliked, and our hopes for the next season or two. You can find it over at the Features page or, alternatively, view it (and many other videos besides) at our Youtube channel.

A sudden and perhaps not unexpected flurry of media interest in a passing DVD commentary remark made by executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss—that’d be for the Bluray and DVD released back in March—has led to a response from both HBO and Benioff & Weiss.

We’ve been posting various video reviews of the series (plus other, A Song of Ice and Fire-related stuff) this year, and now that season 2 is done, Linda and I decided to look back over the season, perhaps re-evaluating some of our early thoughts, and basically explaining in more detail our views on it, pointing out the bits we loved and (sadly) the bits we didn’t. There’s more, including some thoughts regarding the structure of the series, appreciation for some of the tremendous acting and directing, and our hopes for the next season.

It turned out quite long, so we’ve recorded it in two parts. Second part should be up tomorrow or Friday.

You can watch the video at our Feature page, or go directly to our channel. Enjoy!

A little bit of season 3 news is dribbling out in fits and starts, and this time we’ve a bit of news regarding directors for season 3. Contrary to an earlier interview, director and co-executive producer Alan Taylor—who directed “The Prince of Winterfell” and “Valar Morghulis” this season—will not be returning to direct for season 3.

Before “Valar Morghulis” aired, I had the chance to interview Alfie Allen about his role as Theon Greyjoy, his character’s arc, the pranks that a certain pair of executive producers love to pull, and more.

Alfie’s story this season has been one of the highlihghts of season 2, something which I told him and which, as you’ll see, he was quite pleased to hear!

Read the interview!

Via George’s “Not a Blog”, we’ve learned that three of his novels will be recorded as audiobooks, each of them read by a different actor from HBO’s Game of Thrones.  The three books and their respective actors are:

Alyssa Rosenberg, one of the more interesting commentators on HBO’s Game of Thrones, has a great interview with Bryan Cogman (who we’ve interviewed this season) discussing a lot of what goes into the adaptation. Rosenberg touches on some of the topics and concerns that fans have expressed (ourselves included) after this season finale, and Bryan provides cogent answers. Many of them are very much in line with things I’m not bothered by—compression, moving some things around, budget issues, and so on.

Very much worth reading, as Cogman—who, however much he hates it, is indeed the “keeper of the mythos”—is as big a fan of the material as anyone, and is at hand when decisions are made by the showrunners.

We’ve only had one or two outside of contributions this year to our features section, so it was with great pleasure when Miodrag Zarković—a television critic for Serbia’s popular weekly magazine Pečat—contacted us and offered a lengthy consideration on the series to date, in English for an English-speaking audience. Bringing his knowledge of television and literature to bear, as well as his appreciation of the source material, Mr. Zarković shares his views with the readers of Westeros.org in an article titled, “An Adaptation Without Honor, or Adaptation Morghulis - This One’s Dead Already”.

As you can guess, he wasn’t a fan.

His trenchant commentary is not going to appeal to everyone, and there are points we ourselves would happily argue with him about, but his observations come from the heart, are built on a grounding in literary and television history that not everyone has, and some of the points raised seem very hard to argue with. In any case, it is an opinion we felt worth sharing with readers, to provide one unique, thought-provoking perspective from which to consider the adaptation.

(It goes without saying that should a fellow critic or television writer offer up a response or rebuttal, we would be pleased to link to it, or even to publish it on our site!)

The last days, you may have noticed that Westeros.org has been down quite often. That’s because the server just couldn’t handle the amount of load being placed on it. Well, that’s a thing of the past (unless we see exponential levels of growth): the whole of Westeros.org and all of its parts (the Wiki of Ice and Fire, the Forum of Ice and Fire, Blood of Dragons MUSH) is now housed on the same, very capable server. This should mean that the extensive downtimes and great amounts of lag should be a thing of the past (*knocks on wood*).

Many thanks to the community who contributed to help make it possible, and of course to our amazing host, Sparks, who did all the heavy-lifting of getting things together!

Due to severe technical difficulties, posting has been and will be intermittent until we figure out what’s going on and/or move the website to the new server that now hosts the A Song of Ice and Fire forum and the Wiki of Ice and Fire. We’ve posted our lengthy Valar Morghulis coverage, but wanted to catch up with a number of things that have gone on since:

First, apologies for the delay in posting our coverage of “Valar Morghulis”—you have probably noticed that the server has been almost entirely unavailable the last days, and we had similar issues with the server that hosted the forum and wiki, and that occupied… well, way too much of our time. The good news is that we’ve moved the latter server to a much faster box… and we’ll be shifting the website over to that server as well, in time (perhaps even this week), which should vastly improve speed and reliability of the site.

So, in any case, our coverage is up! Check it out and let us know what you think. We’ll be getting our extra video up tomorrow some time, with any luck, but you’ll find our Thronecast appearance (which features a bit more of us than usual—make sure to watch through the end!) and my appearance on the Talking TV podcast embedded in the Extras section.